The chapter offers a reflexive account of the author’s own cowardice to condemn calls for condemnation. Younis looks at that terrible marriage of cowardice and silence – each begetting the other. It is one thing to not condemn, it is another to know deep down that silence, a failure to ‘condemn condemnation’, is born of an ever-present desire to remain seen, recognised and validated. Younis shares a personal account of a time when he consulted for the Montreal police, as part of a special committee which discussed Muslim/Arab concerns. It was not uncommon to discuss issues regarding terrorism/radicalisation in these meetings. When they arose, the narrative remained static: yes, there are ‘bad Muslims’ out there, but there are ‘good Muslims’ (especially in the room) who were model citizens. Model-ness, their very being, was thus the physical manifestation of condemnation. Though misgivings at this thought, he learned to assert (and fail at asserting) his apprehension at other times. Chiefly the chapter charts how silence was often an act of cowardice with its rewards: recognition and trust by those in Power, and at one time a ‘get out of interrogation free card’ at US–Canada border control. But silence is suffocating, as he expresses how he learnt to withhold his thought. This chapter is about how cultures of condemnation result in a yearning to be seen by Power, so that those who are accused can find its ‘good’ light.

The chapter analyzes the second case study: Suzanne Massie – an American writer and expert on Russian culture and history, who developed contacts with officials in Washington and Moscow, and worked to promote dialogue and improve relations between the countries. This chapter examines the activity and influence of Suzanne Massie as a PPE during the years 1983–1988. It explores her relations with both sides, which included frequent visits to the Soviet Union and meetings with US president Ronald Reagan.

A Muslim and a lawyer specialising in national security cases, Fahad Ansari is often filled with anxiety that the actions of one of his clients who happens to share the same faith will result in him becoming the story: the centre of wall-to-wall iage with insinuations of entryism, accusations of extremism and calls for condemnation. Whether that day comes or not, the reality is that his behaviour remains under scrutiny from the authorities, the judiciary and other lawyers because of his open Muslimness. He is regularly required to persuade an often sceptical court that many of the religious beliefs of his clients, such as the supremacy of shariah law, the establishment of a caliphate and jihad, do not fall exclusively within the realm of ‘extremist Muslims’ but are normative mainstream Islamic beliefs shared by over a billion Muslims. The fact that he does not attempt to conceal that he also shares some of those beliefs regularly results in him being regarded as suspect. Refusing to condemn, when society demands it, is enough to become suspect. Glorifying your belief system cements that suspicion. But Ansari takes it a step further which, for many in the profession, places him outside the fold of acceptability – as he condemns the oppressive nature of the legal system his clients are subjected to.

explores the relationship between graphic designers and the Milan Triennale from 1933 to 1957. First, the Triennale is approached as a mediating channel: a public platform to showcase the criteria of good taste and improve public understanding of the practice. Secondly, the Triennale is explored as a commissioning body: an institutional client which commissioned graphic practitioners to design its own visual identity. While showing continuity in the drafting of the practice between the interwar and post-war period, the chapter also addresses the adaptation of design discourses to changing political circumstances. For instance, it traces the critical debates that gradually associated modernist aesthetics with the notion of good taste over two decades. At the same time, it problematises the malleability of modernist graphics as a vehicle of ideologies beyond the design realm. Indeed, an analysis of fascist political exhibitions and propaganda displays – such as the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista in Rome – brings into question the association with democratic and humanist ideals that modernist aesthetics acquired in the post-war period. Chapter 3 also suggests that exhibition design offered practitioners a means of working in three dimensions and experimenting in dialogue with architects and others outsider the typography workshop.

By looking at conflicts, negotiations and temporary alliances between the Aiap (Association of Italian Advertising Artists) and the ADI (Association for Industrial Design), chapter 5 investigates graphic designers’ changing organisational strategies and shows how they mirror the shifting position of the practice in between advertising and design. In line with the book’s overall argument, it demonstrates that practices are in a constant state of formation and that professional bodies play a key role in this open-ended process. Considering graphic designers’ multiple social identities and fields of practice, the chapter investigates graphic design’s continuous renegotiation of its own boundaries and its adaptation to changing design discourses. To better understand the differences between the Aiap and the ADI, and therefore the membership strategies of graphic designers in Italy, it explores contemporary debates around the position of graphic design at the intersection between two allegedly incompatible fields, namely advertising and design. While looking at the local Italian scene, it analyses transnational circuits – the Alliance Graphic Internationale and International Council of Graphic Design Associations – to investigate the ways in which Milan’s graphic designers participated in and responded to transnational debates on graphic design.

This chapter outlines the theoretical framework of the private peace entrepreneur phenomenon and offers a toolkit to discuss and analyze PPEs’ characteristics, activities, and impact. The first part presents a typology of PPEs, outlining their resources, types, and action patterns; the official establishment’s attitude towards PPEs; and critical arguments against their activities. The second part examines PPEs’ impact on the official diplomatic sphere, identifies their influence patterns, and suggests an analytical framework that distinguishes among variables: those related to the PPEs, those related to their peace initiative, and those that are external.

Chapter 3 builds a biography of Princess Diana made up by the images of her body in official portraits, fashion magazine and tea towels – in a context that saw the politics of images of women’s bodies at the forefront of feminist campaigns in all their different forms. A number of academics and commentators have analysed a particular photograph taken of Lady Diana during her engagement to Prince Charles. It was taken in the garden outside the exclusive nursery where she then worked. The sun behind her shone through her cheesecloth skirt and rendered the fabric invisible, exposing her legs underneath. The image linked ideas of Englishness, imperial womanhood and nationhood, and marks the changing relationship between the monarchy and the press. But for Julie Burchill, the combination of Diana’s ‘sweet docile face, a way with children’ and her exposed body made her simultaneously explicitly sexual and innocent. Chapter 3 uses Diana’s contradictory femininity to look at the changing relationship between the politics of gender and the nation and pictures of women’s bodies.

This chapter reframes Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ as ‘natural prevention’. Much of what Darwin described as natural selection can also be seen as the action of biological systems (organisms in their environment) in the prevention of disease and death whether through lack of optimal nutrition or through predation. The chapter looks at how conscious action for such prevention of disease and death, what the authors call ‘Systems Prevention’, is enabled in a species with the advanced communication skills that underpin human consciousness. This unique human capability creates for humans a conscious choice: do they wait for the action of natural prevention against a disease or do they elect to attempt systems prevention? Use or recognition of this human capability is illustrated in pre-history and in ancient civilisations.

Sadia Habib critically reflects on what it means to be the ‘go-to Muslim’, the one that well-meaning friends and not-so-well-meaning acquaintances approach whenever something happens locally, nationally or globally that the media narrate or describe as Muslim related, thinking that their go-to Muslim will be able to provide some insight or knowledge about the issue. Being the go-to Muslim means that she inevitably feels a sense of discomfort about the burden of being made to feel that she must respond to queries that mostly she doesn’t know the answers to. The chapter explores the burden of being a representative of an identity that others assign upon you, as well as the range of conflicted emotions Muslims must go through when put in a difficult, awkward and frustrating position of being the go-to Muslim. What would happen if the roles were reversed just for one week? What types of questions might be asked of those who come to her with queries they just don’t have the answer to? Rather than concentrating on those who are overtly racist, this chapter focuses its attention of White liberal allies, the ones who believe they are beyond racism, and yet somehow manage to perpetuate it in their daily interactions with people of colour.

The rendering of the ‘Muslim’ is crucial to the narrative of the War on Terror. In this chapter, Yassir Morisi explores through an auto-ethnography the relationship between Muslim and ‘Muslim’. The latter figure, in scare quotes, is for Brian Klug a figment, a fantasy and a myth. It represents the Orientalist tale of a callous Other of mindless worship and violence. But how, in the War on Terror narrative, can we separate the two figures easily and how can Muslims refuse to speak in response to the ‘Muslim’? How when everyday Muslims are caught in what Edward Said calls the dehumanising ‘web of racism’; a matrix of language holding in everyday Muslims; a nexus of knowledge and power creating the ‘Muslim’ and simultaneously obliterating the Muslim’s voice? Furthermore, despite being the focal point of racialised discussions about Islam, the threatening ‘Muslim’ is always deferred and is spectral in nature, befitting a post-racial colour blindness. Much like the figure of the ghost, its dual presence and absence protects the War on Terror narrative from charges of racism, and hence, shaped by the political forces of the War on Terror, Morsi contends that the Muslim becomes a complex (im)possible (suspended) subject in a post-9/11 world where (self-)knowledge remains tentative, contingent and situated within a discussion about the threatening status of our Otherness.

Returning from ‘the Jungle’ refugee camp in Calais, Lowkey describes an interaction with a border officer feigning friendliness. The rapper, who had been at the camps to assist as a translator on a pro bono basis, is being quizzed on his views alongside his friends, leading to a series of reflections on the it and overt forms of violence that exist within this moment. This chapter focuses on how in the seeming normal world that all of us occupy, there exists a shadowy underworld of profiling and algorithm-based assessments that turn our innocuous activities into ones that are pathologised as being potentially dangerous. Lowkey writes of his rap music in particular, and how it has been used by Prevent at times, and at other times been barred from mainstream airplay. What is always clear is that it is not the form that is the issue, but rather the messenger and his message. Lowkey’s reflections in this chapter remind us that there is a disparity in the power and control those who resist have from those who exert control from inside a system of structural racism – but that ultimately there are ways of holding on to your own ethics, while challenging that very structure.